The Red Oak Creek Covered Bridge’s longevity is nearly as astounding as the story of its builder, Horace King, part black, part white, part Catawba Indian—a man so far ahead of his time that he wore a soul patch 60 years before anyone heard of jazz.

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It doesn’t much matter what I think about Superica and The El Felix, Ford Fry’s two new Tex-Mex restaurants with almost identical menus and almost identical lines. When I asked the manager of The El Felix—in Avalon, the Alpharetta mall-city—how many diners they served, he said, “Three to four hundred on a slow night.”

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Style & Substance

How to decorate with summer's happiest hues, a Swedish midsummer celebration, where to shop on the Westside, Nancy Braithwaite on Coco Chanel, luxe life on the lake, an essay from Mary Kay Andrews, and much more in the summer issue of Atlanta Magazine's HOME.

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Southbound magazine, the newest ancillary title from the publishers of Atlanta magazine, showcases the top travel destinations in the Southeast. We visit idyllic small towns and exciting cities in search of outstanding vacation opportunities.Inside Southbound

Custom Publication

Georgia offers diverse places to see and things to do, from the mountains in North Georgia to the coasts of Savannah and The Golden Isles. Take a tour in your own backyard and visit all that our great state has to offer. Begin your tour

Dining in has its advantages: You can wear what you want, eat when you want, and drink as much as you like. To craft the perfect dinner party but skip dirtying the kitchen, look to these seven purveyors for the best meat, cheese, pasta, wine, and dessert.

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July 2015: Top Doctors

The list of doctors whom other doctors trust most. Plus, a roundtable of experts on the challenges of Alzheimer’s disease, and an Atlanta photographer documents his surgeon father’s struggle with dementia.

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The first Braves game in Atlanta

April 9, 1965

The night before the first braves game played in Atlanta, general manager Dick Cecil called Atlanta Journal sportswriter Lee Walburn: “Want to join us for batting practice?”

Walburn raced to the stadium and was at home plate “before the players strapped their jocks on.” And so, with soon-to-be announcer Ernie Johnson pitching, Walburn hit the first ball in Atlanta Stadium, a line drive into left field.

“Of course, the next night Tommie Aaron hit the first home run in the Atlanta stadium, and that’s what history will record,” says Walburn. Tommie and big brother Hank played that April 9, 1965, game in Atlanta—an exhibition outing against the Detroit Tigers—as Milwaukee Braves. Although Atlanta won the franchise in 1964, legal disputes kept the team tied up in Milwaukee into early 1966.

The Atlanta Braves played their first official season opener on April 12, 1966, losing 3–2 to the Pittsburgh Pirates in front of a sellout crowd in a thirteen-inning game. The starting lineup included Hank Aaron in right field and Joe Torre as catcher. The first pitch was thrown by Mayor Ivan Allen Jr., who had led efforts to bring big league sports to Atlanta, famously saying the stadium was erected “on land we didn’t own, with money we didn’t have, and for teams we had not signed.”

Nine years later, Hank Aaron would hit his record-setting 715th home run in that stadium. It was a moment that Walburn—who went on to become PR director for the Braves and, in time, editor in chief of Atlanta magazine—would write about decades later: As Aaron “circles the bases with the same casual gait he’s used 714 times before, nearly 54,000 of us rise from our seats like a giant ocean wave churned by a sudden gust of wind.”